What You Are by M.G. Vassanji

Author:M.G. Vassanji [Vassanji, M.G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

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Amyn returns home and has leftover curry for dinner. She’d frozen it for him the day before. Curry the next day always tastes better. That’s an old adage and it’s true. It’s Friday and she’s gone, having texted him earlier that she found a flight to DC that she could take today instead of Saturday. His first instinct upon entering the empty house was to give her a call, but he resisted. She should have her time. He’s jealous, of course. With the boys gone, they’re as free as a young couple now, and there’s a lot they could do together but they lack the will. That inertia—all the karma of a marriage weighing them down. It seems she couldn’t wait to get away. And Layla is pure mischief, he recalls. He reads a new book by a young author from Togo he likes, makes notes in the margins while listening to music. Then he listlessly turns his laptop on and checks his emails. Casually—so he thinks—he Googles a name. And there it is. Nilufer Somani. Nilu.

After what, thirty-three years? Still pretty, he thinks, staring hard at the three-quarter-length photo on the screen. In a business suit now, hair short as before but styled. Perhaps dyed. What would he say to her? I survived, Nilu.

He had gone to Cambridge, Mass, from Ithaca, New York, and stayed at his friend Adil’s, where he met Nilu at a dinner. One of those expatriate gatherings in a student house, she from the Congo and speaking French too. All of them new graduates in their twenties, from “back there” and not more than a few years in the US, scattered across the northeast, excited to be where they were and doing what they did. Linked by Amtrak, they met regularly in their different cities. This time someone new was present, discovered by Adil in Cambridge, and Amyn was sitting beside her on the floor and they got into a passionate discussion—about Kierkegaard, he remembers that—while the rest were on about Nixon and the Watergate hearings that had preoccupied the entire nation. He had never felt such a connection to anyone before, never met anyone so empathetic, with interests so close to his. Even as they talked, he trembled, staring into her eyes, thinking, this is surely it. Back in Ithaca he would call her often, and they had long conversations that became progressively intimate.

Two months later she invited him to Cambridge, and he stayed again with Adil. Having arrived Friday evening, he agreed to meet her for coffee Saturday morning at a place called the Blue Parrot. When they met, he was surprised to find her edgy and in a hurry. She had to go soon. This was to be their rendezvous, what happened? “Wait, what’s the hurry? I want to tell you something,” he insisted. She blushed. “Me too,” she said softly. “But later.” He had imagined that the two of them would go out for dinner, but instead she invited him and Adil to a dinner with her friends that evening.

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